Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [55]
“I’m away in Pennsylvania most of the time!” Ian told him.
“Then maybe you should drop out.”
“Drop out?”
“Right.”
“Drop out of college?”
“Right.”
Ian stared at him.
“This is some kind of test, isn’t it?” he said finally.
Reverend Emmett nodded, smiling. Ian sagged with relief.
“It’s God’s test,” Reverend Emmett told him.
“So …”
“God wants to know how far you’ll go to undo the harm you’ve done.”
“But He wouldn’t really make me follow through with it,” Ian said.
“How else would He know, then?”
“Wait,” Ian said. “You’re saying God would want me to give up my education. Change all my parents’ plans for me and give up my education.”
“Yes, if that’s what’s required,” Reverend Emmett said.
“But that’s crazy! I’d have to be crazy!”
“ ‘Let us not love in word, neither in tongue,’ ” Reverend Emmett said, “ ‘but in deed and in truth.’ First John three, eighteen.”
“I can’t take on a bunch of kids! Who do you think I am? I’m nineteen years old!” Ian said. “What kind of a cockeyed religion is this?”
“It’s the religion of atonement and complete forgiveness,” Reverend Emmett said. “It’s the religion of the Second Chance.”
Then he set the hymnals on the counter and turned to offer Ian a beatific smile. Ian thought he had never seen anyone so absolutely at peace.
“I don’t understand,” his mother said.
“What’s to understand? It’s simple,” Ian told her. “What you mean is, you don’t approve.”
“Well, of course she doesn’t approve,” his father said. “Neither one of us approves. No one in his right mind would approve. Here you are, attending a perfectly decent college which you barely got into by the skin of your teeth, incidentally; you’ve had no complaints about the place that your mother or I are aware of; you’re due back this Sunday evening to begin your second semester and what do you up and tell us? You’re dropping out.”
“I’m taking a leave of absence,” Ian said.
They were sitting in the dining room late Friday night—much too late to have only then finished supper, but Daphne had developed an earache and what with one thing and another it had somehow got to be nine P.M. before they’d put the children in bed. Now Bee, having risen to clear the table, sank back into her chair. Doug shoved his plate away and leaned his elbows on the table. “Just tell me this,” he said to Ian. “How long do you expect this leave of absence to last?”
“Oh, maybe till Daphne’s in first grade. Or kindergarten, at least,” Ian said.
“Daphne? What’s Daphne got to do with it?”
“The reason I’m taking a leave is to help Mom raise the kids.”
“Me?” his mother cried. “I’m not raising those children! We’re looking for a guardian! First we’ll find Lucy’s people and then I know there’ll be someone, some young couple maybe who would just love to—”
“Mom,” Ian said. “You know the chances of that are getting slimmer all the time.”
“I know nothing of the sort! Or an aunt, maybe, or—”
Doug said, “Well, he’s got a point, Bee. You’ve been running yourself ragged with those kids.”
Contrarily, Ian felt a pinch of alarm. Would his father really let him go through with this?
His mother said, “And anyway, how about the draft? You’ll be drafted the minute you leave school.”
“If I am, I am,” Ian told her, “but I don’t think I will be. I think God will take care of that.”
“Who?”
“And I do plan to pay my own way,” he said. “I’ve already found a job.”
“Doing what?” his father asked. “Moving poor folks’ furniture?”
“Building furniture.”
They peered at him.
“I’ve made arrangements with this cabinetmaker,” Ian said. “I’ve seen him at work and I asked if I could be his apprentice.”
Student, was the way he’d finally put it. Having sought out the cabinetmaker in that apartment full of china crates and mothballs, he had plunged into the subject of apprenticeship only to be met with a baffled stare. The man had sat back on his heels and studied Ian’s lips. “Apprentice,” Ian had repeated, enunciating carefully. “Pupil.”
“People?” the man had asked. Two furrows stitched themselves across his leathery forehead.
“I already have some experience,” Ian